Apple owns my ass, Amazon owns my trash
How life is changing beyond recognition from just a few years ago
At the beginning of the year I finally succumbed to the (near) full Apple experience when I ditched my really nice and somewhat ancient Montblanc wrist watch for an Apple Watch. I also traded my iPhone XS Max for a 13. Why?
As I’ve been adjusting to retirement I’ve become painfully aware just how tired I’d become. Getting a decent and consistent night’s sleep has been a challenge for years. As I’ve alluded to before, I racked up a menu of ‘reasons’ for why this was OK. Deep down I knew it wasn’t but as an unremarkable human, I’m as good as the next person at fooling myself into believing any bullshit I choose as convenient.
Over the Christmas holiday, one of the children showed me how their Apple Watch monitors their heart rate and can call emergency services in certain circumstances. That got my attention as I come from a family where the older men have a habit of dropping dead from heart attacks despite enjoying otherwise good health.
The Apple Watch has plenty of wellness features and apps. For me, the sleep related apps are the most interesting. They nag me to get into a bedtime routine, set sleep goals and encourage me to avoid certain foods and booze within 4-6 hours before going to bed. They also monitor my heart rate and sleep quality. As a result, the Watch is pushing me towards a healthier approach to sleep. It’s working. While my average amount of nightly sleep isn’t optimal, it’s improving and I feel better for it.
Alongside, the Watch nags me to stand, exercise and walk. At times it’s annoying, especially if I’m engrossed in something else. On other occasions it’s a welcome reminder that being rooted to a painting booth or modelling desk for hours on end isn’t optimal.
I wonder how this might work (sic) if I was attending a three hour conference presentation surrounded by thousands of others. The thought of a collective standing session sounds comical to me but eminently imaginable in the near future.
In other news, Amazon owns my trash. Two of the above bins are for recycling and guess what? We fill and sometimes overfill them with mountains of cardboard and paper, mostly courtesy of Amazon. It’s annoying. Why?
I don’t know what training Amazon provides it’s packers but it can’t include the economical use of packaging materials. Too often, it seems that packers use whatever is to hand rather than pack with materials appropriate to the size of the goods being delivered. On one occasion, a set of garden scissors came in the packaging equivalent of a Russian doll the size of a small suitcase. There are many other examples.
It’s great that Amazon encourages us to recycle but the waste - and attendant cost - seems disproportionate to the value delivered.
You can argue that we shouldn’t be such rabid consumers and that’s a fair point. But the fact remains that COVID-19 has fundamentally changed our shopping habits, probably forever. Other than most clothing, I can’t think of any household goods we consume that we wouldn’t routinely buy online.
Waste isn’t one dimensional and I’d argue that Amazon needs to do much more. We also need to do more. Effectively being chained to our house in anticipation of an Amazon delivery isn’t healthy in a post-COVID world.
Now time for arm swings and stair stepping. Sigh!
Enjoyed this post and always remember thinking....when does Dennis sleep as you would be on social media what seemed to me was all hours of the day.
Saw this keynote speaker a conference a few years ago talk about the importance of sleep and from that point on we got a new king bed, great mattress, sheets, silky pillow covers, white noise, dark window coverings and a few more things. I think “most” people overestimate the amount of real sleep they get (I know I did) until you get a tracking device (i.e Fitbit, Whoop) as going to bed at 11pm and waking up at 7am is not 8 hours of sleep.
The average 50 year old male for example is awake 12-24% so your 8 hours above is either a little over 7 hours (if you are good sleeper) or 6 hours (24%). In my case I am 11% awake (which is pretty good) and my goal is 7 hours of actual sleep (means ~8 hours in bed) which is sufficient as hard to get more given my kids schedule (up at 6:10am weekdays and lots of early weekend mornings for sports) and been pretty close to that for the past year.
Highly recommend everyone considers some typing of sleep tracking system/technology as the correlation between sleep and overall physical and mental health and productivity is a strong one.
E-commerce packaging used to be bundled up and sent to China in empty container ships. Then Trump and Xi got into a pissing match, now China is extremely fussy, cardboard has to be clean, uniform in size and only soft plastics easy to recycle into pellets are acceptable. I wonder where the UK recycling ends up....